Follow my blog via Email!

Categories

A slow post.

So I know it’s been a little while between posts, I was trying to do them every Monday on our rest day. However we have been trying to predict the on coming weather, and to get the most out of the week, training wise before we might be forced in doors for a day or two. I have recently been introduced to a weather pattern known as the Storm Door. It has a lot to do with all the air pressures coming from Alaska and hitting the Atlantic Ocean. In short when the Storm Door opens Snowy Heaven breaks loose! It looks like we are going to be getting a taste of it this weekend with 1 to 2 meters of snow expected to fall in 48 hours. However Tahoe is still one of the only areas with snow and with the first races only a week away things aren’t looking good.

After the second snowstorm came through.

Hence why the post has taken so long, we were meant to be road tripping to West Yellowstone on Saturday to prepare for the races, and things here were hectic, trying to fit in as much volume as possible before the drive and therefore skipping rest days. However they have such little snow we will now delay as long as possible here in Tahoe before heading there for a few nights before skipping on to Canada.

The last few weeks have been great training. I don’t think I have seen this much sun straight in a long time and it’s literally either pumping snow here or perfect blue bird days! So far our biggest problem has been staying hydrated because it’s so hot!

Hill bounding session in some sweet Californian sun!

Winding back the clocks just over a week, we chucked on the riding gear once again but this time we didn’t drive anywhere, instead we saddled up and headed out the back of our house, into the forest beyond. A snowstorm was predicted that day so we new that we had to be fairly quick otherwise the chances of getting snowed on was pretty high. Clearly we weren’t quick enough to get organised because 30 minutes into our ride snowflakes started to fall. It didn’t bother us much to start as we climbed the main ridge up behind our house and there was still snowdrifts on the ground from the last storm. Eventually we came to a point where the snowdrifts were too deep to ride through and we had to turn back to find another single track. The decent to the single track, where we would begin climbing again was when the falling snow became a problem. If it’s snowing, clearly the temperature is cold. As we bombed down the ridge we begun to appreciate how cold it was, and by the time we reached the next climb our legs had stiffened with the cold and for the first few minutes of the climb, we all wobbled around on our bikes and we tried to force our legs to spin.

Mid ride, still looking pretty clean.

After ridding along the single track for a while we reached a point in the ride, which Gregor called the “Wall”, a steep descent down into a gully where the track turned into a series of switchbacks. The descent was awesome but also fairly interesting because the “Wall” is in the shade and still had a large amount of snow from the previous storm. Once we were down the “Wall” we hit huge amounts of mud and the switchbacks of the gully. Eventually Callum, Gregor and I emerged from the gully and cruised on home via a coffee shop leaving a trail of mud behind us.

Again this week has heated up training wise, compared to the last week and the next is looking borderline brutal but it should be great. This is the time of year that counts so hopefully we see the gains later on. We have had one time trial and have another planned this weekend and things are looking like they are on track so that should be good.

Happy times, Rollerskiing.

Another fun activity we had this week was the “Turkey Trot”, a 7 mile run around one of the lakes in the area. Due to all the snow and cold temperatures the track wasn’t deemed safe enough to run and instead a race through a local park consisting of four laps of roughly one kilometre was run instead. Firstly 4 km isn’t my distance at all but to make things even more interesting there was roughly a foot and a half of snow covering the park so it turned from a 7 mile run into a 4-kilometre snow sprint. Not great for a heavy guy like me. From the photo below you can see the carnage of the start, on the first lap I found myself a long way back in about 20th but perhaps there were a few too many keen beans sprinting at the start because I begun to pass a lot of people in the second and third lap. Very quickly I found myself on the last lap and sprinting with a good friend of mine Patrick for third place and the line. In the end he out sprinted me for third, and the bragging rights!

The trot begins. I’m in black in the middle of the pack.

As Thanks Giving slowly approaches we have already had a few early Thanks Giving’s dinners with friends and we have a few more planned which is exciting. It’s been a lot of fun heading to different people houses and chilling out and Callum and I have even had most of the senior team over for dinner one night, which was great.

Dinner time with the crew.

That’s all for now, fingers crossed we get a whole lot of snow in a few days!

Train hard. Rest easy, Live for the moment.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

Published by

pkovacsxc

My name is Paul Kovacs and I am a professional cross country skier from Australia. I currently live and train in Anchorage, Alaska and travel and race throughout the US and Europe. I am aiming to compete in the 2017 World Championships in Lahti, Finland and the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Tune in to read about my endeavours from around the world and what it takes as I attempt to achieve some measure of success on the world stage in cross country skiing.
View all posts by pkovacsxc